Pure DC's 110 MW microgrid in Dublin became operational in April 2026, described by the developer as Europe's first at that scale.1 The microgrid is explicitly designed to bypass the Irish grid-connection queue and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) December 2025 rule requiring new data centres to source 80% of annual demand from additional Irish-sited renewables within six years of energisation.
Pure DC is a Dublin-based developer specialising in mid-scale colocation campuses for cloud and AI workloads. The CRU is Ireland's national energy regulator, the equivalent of Ofgem in the UK or FERC in the United States. Its December 2025 decision was the most restrictive data centre connection framework adopted by any European regulator, requiring new sites to procure additional Irish renewables (rather than buying existing capacity) plus matching dispatchable generation, all within a six-year window from going live.
Pure DC's bypass works on a regulatory technicality. A site that generates its own power through an on-site microgrid is not a "new connection" in the sense the CRU rule contemplates; it is a self-generator, falling outside the framework written for grid-connected loads. The 110 MW capacity is large enough to support a meaningful AI workload but small enough to keep the project below the threshold that triggers separate planning consents.
The CRU also required EirGrid and ESB Networks, the Irish transmission and distribution operators, to publish a data centre engagement and connection process by 31 March 2026.2 No such publication was visible 26 days past that deadline as of this briefing's compilation date. The combination of Pure DC's microgrid bypass and the regulator-mandated documentation slipping past its 31 March deadline is the Irish microcosm of the broader pattern: constraint designed in policy, routed around in steel.
